AMERICAN HEALTH CARE DEBACLE: Gouging the Poor

From the Progressive:

Hospitals are increasingly resorting to brass knuckle tactics to collect overdue bills from indigent patients. Take the case of Martin Bushman, an intermittently insured mechanic with diabetes who, as reported in The Wall Street Journal, had run up a $579 debt to Carle Hospital in Champaign-Urbana. When he failed to appear for a court hearing on his debt rather than miss a day of work, he was arrested and hit with $2,500 bail. Arrests for missed court dates, which the hospitals whimsically refer to as "body attachments," are on the rise throughout the country.

And

To compound the sufferings of the sick and sub-affluent, hospitals now routinely charge uninsured people several times more than the insured. The Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel reports that one local hospital charged an uninsured patient $29,000 for an appendectomy that would have cost an insured patient $6,783. According to the Los Angeles Times, in one, albeit for-profit, California hospital chain, the uninsured account for only 2 percent of its patients, but 35 percent of its profits. The explanation for such shameless gouging of the poor? Big insurance companies and HMOs are able to negotiate "discounts" for their members, leaving the uninsured to pay whatever fanciful amounts the hospital cares to charge, such as, in one reported case, $50 for the use of a hospital gown.

Being poor sucks. Being poor and sick sucks even worse, and it may just get you thrown in jail.

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